Veronica said: ‘We hear that Paris might well be a contender for 2012. A formidable rival, Esther. New York City could be another tough opponent. Manchester failed to secure a Games lately, so there’s obviously no sentimental preference for the UK among Olympic decision-makers. If London is to get them, they will have to be won. It follows – I think you’ll accept, Esther – it follows that we can do without the sort of negative qualities so troublesome at the moment in the Temperate Park and Whitsun Festival estates, and which have led to what must be seen as a depressingly typical killing.’
‘Or the perception of this negativeness,’ Maldwyn said.
Esther didn’t care much about whether the Olympics came to London or didn’t, but she could see that some would. And she saw, too, that Whitsun, Temperate and Tasker might shake London’s chances. These two, Veronica and Maldwyn, could have no notion what it was like dealing with Whitsun, Temperate and the Tasker case. But it wasn’t their job to deal with Whitsun, Temperate and the Tasker case. Their mission was to get London looking nice and spruce for the committee who’d pick the short list of contenders for 2012, and then choose the winner. As part of their mission this pair had come to let Esther know that although there might seem to be plenty of time, there wasn’t.
‘I want to assure you, Esther, that all concerned believe you, with your experience and skills, remain unquestionably the officer who can, as it were, turn this adverse set of circumstances around,’ Veronica said. ‘Commander Chawse of course agrees. Any replacement coming in might, it’s true, bring fresh vision and dynamism, but could not conceivably have your “on the ground” knowledge. Such a replacement would be starting with a very considerable handicap and, even if his or her talents were exceptional, might be unable to rectify these very unpromising conditions. Or not swiftly enough.’
Esther could read their thinking. It assumed that solution of the murder and winning back the estates would be related. The killer, killers, of Tasker most likely came from one of the firms and a credible, processable arrest would show that the law did still operate on Whit and Temperate. This would be the start of general cleansing. There might be something in this idea, but not much.
‘Someone got shot,’ Esther said. ‘That’s the long and short of it.’
‘It might be the short of it,’ Veronica said, with a sweet, injurious lilt. ‘Certainly a man was shot. But the long? The long must entail, surely, the significance of this death in the larger scene. The, yes, alarmingly symbolic elements here.’
‘Larger scene . . . ?’ Esther said.
‘Than the mere death,’ she said.
‘Veronica doesn’t mean “mere” in the belittling sense of that word, naturally,’ Maldwyn said at once. ‘Plainly, no death can be mere.’ He magicked up sadness to his face. ‘But she is using “mere” as equivalent to, say, “isolated”. The death is part of a wider scene.’
‘A touchstone,’ Veronica said.
Maldwyn said: ‘Please don’t imagine for a moment we are here to tell the police their job.’ He chuckled more than briefly, to show how preposterous that aim would have been had it been their aim.
And Esther did not imagine it was, but knew it was. Therefore, wished to bellow ‘Fuck off, both of you!’
‘We do feel it is especially worrying that the man Gervaise Manciple Tasker, murdered because of some kind of link to the estates, should have been a journalist,’ Maldwyn said. He reran sadness. ‘Obviously it would be bad whatever Tasker’s occupation. Someone is dead and a family grieves. We all recognize this and sympathize. But the fact that he was a reporter is bound to produce extra quantities of damaging media attention. Editors are liable to highlight the dangers of estates like Whitsun and Temperate and ask – pointedly and repeatedly ask – why these dangers are allowed to persist, why nobody has been brought to book for the slaughter of Gervaise Manciple Tasker.’
Veronica got activated again. ‘A novelist called Abel Vagrain – quite well known – The Insignia of Postponement and so on – is interested in the situation on Whitsun and Temperate, especially the murder of Tasker. He has been in touch with both press offices – the Mayor’s and ours at the Home Office – looking for what he calls, I gather, “context briefings” about the estates. Maldwyn will confirm what I’ve been told by one of our spokespeople at the HO, that Vagrain seemed to have more knowledge of matters on Whitsun and Temperate than could have been gained only from media reports. And he knew of Thrasher and interstitial.’
‘Our officer felt the same about his seriousness,’ Maldwyn said.
‘The implication must be that Vagrain is already far into his researches and hopes to use the Whitsun/Temperate enmities as setting for a new work,’ Veronica said. ‘You might think a writer would be deterred by Tasker’s fate from attempting similar inquiries. The child playground display obviously aimed to scare others off. The fact is, though, that this killing becomes not a no-no but a sort of bonus for Vagrain – another dramatic, exploitable element in his fiction. As he’d see it, death livens up a chapter or two. This is how novelists are. Their only focus is on what they can use in a tale.’ She would be about thirty-three or thirty-four, slim, dark, eye-bright, square-faced beyond what would have been an adequate squareness of face.
‘A television arts show gave a mighty boost to Vagrain’s The Insignia of Postponement, as you probably know,’ Maldwyn said. ‘What we don’t want is a repeat of such a publicity fuss several years from now, when Vagrain will have finished and then published the story. It could be a critical moment in the Games strategy. We would have to combat réclame for a novel by Vagrain saying – and saying at bookish length and with literary weight – saying, that parts of London are wild, lawless, murderous. He has the kind of status that would ensure best-seller ranking abroad as well as here.’
‘And abroad is somewhere we have to impress, and defeat,’ Veronica said.
There was nothing mean or obviously snide and vindictive in Veronica’s face. You could see faces like hers looking out from bus windows or searching for bargains at the local car-boot sale. Her cheeks had small, shallow hollows near her mouth, which would fascinate some, Esther thought. A man might want to take her for a hefty feed somewhere to see if they plumped out. When Maldwyn or Esther was speaking, Veronica would slump forward and rest her head on the table as if she’d swallowed poison. Esther spotted no grey at her roots.
Veronica had on a high-necked, four-button black jacket of cotton, or a mixture, with four buttoned-down pockets, the top two on her chest slightly askew. Esther thought these a clever idea because they modified the otherwise general severity of the style. The many buttons could suggest miserliness or control-freakdom. Her skirt was a coordinate, black-navy, to just above the knee. She wore a thick gold necklace.
‘I think you understand the urgency of our message, Esther,’ she said.
‘Definitely,’ Esther said. Yes, they wanted her to go up to Whitsun and Temperate and look out Pellotte and Amesbury and say genially and woman-to-men, ‘Come on now, lads, cough who beat up and killed Gervaise Manciple Tasker for me, please, otherwise, you see, it might disastrously queer London’s prospects for the 2012 Olympic Games? The Government and the Mayor’s office are so anxious. You probably haven’t thought of it in that light till now, Adrian, Harold, or one of you would obviously have come forward before and given us a name, names, plus very best wishes to all those helping build London’s case for the Games. They might not have been the correct name, names, just those of a person, people, you wanted to get rid of, but you would have longed to make some sort of imitation civic gesture, in keeping with your respective high positions.’
‘Incidentally, Maldwyn is very much a grapevining person,’ Veronica said.
‘It can be a plus,’ Esther said.
‘This telly programme we’ve been talking about, A Week in Review,’ Veronica said. ‘Maldwyn has discovered that . . . but I should let him tell it for himself.’
‘Media people – I bump i
nto quite a few,’ Maldwyn said. ‘It’s the normal course of things. A Week in Review, I gather, has invited your husband to become a panellist. More importantly, he’s accepted.’
‘Frankly, we wonder about the wisdom of this,’ Veronica said.
‘Absolutely no reflection on Gerald Davidson’s abilities,’ Maldwyn said. ‘Does anyone do Hindemith better? Gerald, Hindemith and the bassoon seem made for one another.’ Maldwyn rarely looked at either of them when he spoke. In fact, he closed his eyes for much of it, like some university don needing to concentrate on simplifying a big, complex thought for the stupid undergraduate he tutored. His voice could assume almost any intonation, but never even approached rage or contempt during the meeting. Esther would put him at, say, twenty-six, although his hair had begun to back away from his brow. He was middle height, burly running towards fat, thick-fingered, bull-necked, his skin paler than pale, almost into pallor. He wore a zip-up, navy woollen jacket trimmed at the zip and pockets with strips of khaki, dark moleskin trousers, inexpensive blue and white training shoes. He had magnificent teeth but didn’t make a thing of showing them off, as if afraid he’d be confined in people’s impressions of him as the lad with the teeth.
‘We’re bound to be unhappy about any Pellotte connection via A Week in Review. As Maldwyn hears it, the programme’s regular chairman is seeing Pellotte’s daughter, Dione – a meaningful relationship. Or Pellotte intends it to be a meaningful relationship. There are obvious concerns on his side, and probably Dione’s, about Bale’s apparent flagrant compatibility with Priscilla Sandine, on that Insignia of Postponement show.’
‘Plus Bale lives on Temperate,’ Maldwyn said.
‘This is potentially a mix of dangerous elements,’ Veronica said.
Maldwyn said: ‘On the other hand, as you’ll probably know, Esther, the producer of the programme has a place on Whitsun, and was observed in long, seemingly amicable discussion with Pellotte and his bagman, Dean Feston, on Gideon Road. Also they called at his home, 19a Bell Close. They used a taxi. Did they want to disguise the visit? Pellotte’s BMW might be regarded as too well known. No taxi driver would dare to speak about the trip if instructed not to by Feston.’
‘You’ll understand our anxieties when we find that the husband of the officer nominally in charge of policing those two problematical estates intends to become a part of these very dubious circumstances,’ Veronica said.
What the hell did she mean by ‘nominally’? Did it signal Veronica thought Esther had only a frail hold on things at present and might not be around here much longer?
When Esther went home in the evening she helped Gerald choose his best profile by holding a mirror at various angles around his head. ‘The left, I think,’ he said.
‘Unquestionably.’
‘Not that the right is totally unacceptable.’ He grabbed her wrist in one of his martial arts grips to turn the mirror so it did his right again.
‘Not unacceptable at all,’ Esther said.
‘But the left marginally better.’
‘I’d say so.’
‘I want to let the director and producer at A Week in Review know which side of the camera I should prefer when I speak.’
‘Whichever, you’ll come over brilliantly, Ger.’
‘I hate it when you suck up to me. It sounds so phoney.’
‘Some people don’t want you to appear on the show at all,’ Esther replied. ‘I’m not going to be pushed about by them. So, I speak encouragement. “Let us now praise famous profiles.” But I’ll work on the sincerity aspect if you’re going to be picky.’
‘Which people don’t want me to go on?’
‘People around.’
‘It’s fucking envy, is it?’ Gerald said.
‘Other considerations.’
‘Which?’
‘Almost everyone has one profile markedly more attractive than the other,’ Esther replied. ‘You can see it in police dossier photographs.’
‘I don’t say “markedly”.’
‘You’re lucky in that respect.’
‘I hate it when you suck up to me. It’s phoney.’
‘Honestly, it’s not meant to be, Gerald, dear, but you’ll understand the difficulties, I know.’
Twelve
It really grieved Adrian Pellotte when someone in the firm tried skimming off the top, and cornering money that rightly should have come to the treasury of Happy Gardening Solutions. They were on their way to see someone in that dismal category now. Pellotte found disloyalty almost impossible to understand. If you belonged to a company, drew your income through a company, you surely owed it your full, honest allegiance.
Of course, Pellotte knew that many would say the amount of money involved here with Gordon Basil Hodge – less than £21K – they’d say this bagatelle probably did not justify an a.m. door knock by him, Adrian Pellotte: that is, Adrian Pellotte personally. It meant risk and it was footling. But Pellotte believed he should let it be known once in a while around Whitsun that he – yes, he personally, Adrian Pellotte himself – he, Adrian Pellotte, still checked the accounts for fiddling, and could become so hurt by these attempts at deception that he felt it correct to show his, yes, again, his personal pain and disappointment on the spot, such as Hodgy’s nest in Larch Street. Pellotte’s pain and disappointment might be acute, but they did not disable him.
People needed to be reminded that Adrian Pellotte was more than a mystical, pervasive presence on Whitsun, occasionally glimpsed being chauffeured across the estate to collect from and supply sales executives. When it suited, Adrian Pellotte could and did take a down-to-earth part in things. Even someone as minor as Hodge might have to be made an example of pour encourager les autres, as the phrase went. The BMW outside his front door would inform neighbours that a procedure, reproachful and serious, driven by disappointment as much as anger, was probably under way at Gordon Basil Hodge’s. They’d listen out. They’d absorb the lesson. They’d pass on that lesson to others on Whitsun. What they would not do is pass on anything to the police, suppose the emergency services became involved at the address later as a result of the visit by Pellotte and Dean. Pellotte regarded his actual participation as to some degree a public relations matter, but also a chance to reacquaint himself with basic fieldwork skills not often called into play these days.
Dean Feston drove the BMW over towards Larch. Dean had obviously been doing some thinking, and had a fair whack on general topics to speak about now. Dean wouldn’t degrade himself by discussing Hodge and how to deal with him today. A skimmer could never deserve that kind of attention. Nor would Dean refer to his arrest, with Gabrielle Barter Cornish, on suspicion of involvement in the death of that grossly, persistently, invasive journalist. Dean would regard such behaviour by the police as an automatic, blind, impulsive, not worth a word. Dean liked discussions to be on larger issues. Pellotte could put up with it. Sometimes what Dean said did matter. ‘Very regrettably, some fail to realize the hold a child – son or daughter – has over the feelings of a father, Adrian,’ he stated now.
‘In which respect, Dean?’
‘We’ve traced those four relationships of the TV producer, Larry Edgehill. All hetero, but, crucially, he’s got no kids to our knowledge. People like that, they can’t properly understand the bond, the sense of parental obligation. Despite those two meetings with Edgehill, I wonder if he’ll appreciate how vital, supremely vital, it is for him and his continued well-being in a quite physical sense to make sure of Dione’s safety and general contentment. I mean, really exert himself on this, not just something token. In his own interests, Adrian. OK, he’s someone at present fit and strong and able to maintain a long conversation while stooped that day in Gideon. This despite a pretty sedentary existence. So, I don’t deny he’s entitled to feel comfortable with his selfhood, however fragile. But I’d hate to believe he takes your goodwill on this kind of topic for granted, Aid.’
‘We’ll return to Edgehill again if necessary and be much mo
re pointed about what I expect from him as a duty – reasonably expect from him as a duty. Much more. I believe he’ll try on our behalf, Dione’s and mine. I feel he saw the urgency. A call at his own property – he’s bound to appreciate the significance of that.’
‘You’re always inclined to think generously of people.’
‘How else can one live satisfactorily, responsibly, Dean? How? How? Despair otherwise. Positivism – the search for it must be unceasing.’ To quite an extent, Pellotte believed this, and, so, he decided he’d give those opening chats with Edgehill a little while yet to take effect. Occasionally, Pellotte thought well of patience. And for now, in any case, the firm’s routine business and related matters had to be carried on. The session with Hodge would be a sorting-out encounter. Dean had spoken of this kind of measure when explaining to Edgehill why, originally, they hadn’t doorstepped him. Such a visit, with Pellotte’s car, could produce unfavourable repercussions and gossip throughout the estate. Although Pellotte hoped the present call would be fairly untroublesome and quick, he realized there might be snags, complications, even foolish time-wasting.
This morning, Pellotte felt exceptionally eager to avoid these because he and Dean would go on to a meeting later at handsome and fascinating Faunt Castle in the country. The Anthony Powell Society was holding its biennial conference there. Dean and Pellotte both belonged. They loved the novels of Powell, the twentieth-century English writer who wrote about the upper classes. Faunt Castle was thought to be the model for Stourwater, one of the great houses, important in Powell’s books. Pellotte and Dean needed to look bandbox smooth when they arrived there, not bloodstained or limping or anything uncomely like that, particularly Dean who had agreed to give a keynote talk. Dean knew Powell’s work well. He’d needed something substantial to read in jail and a twelve-volume novel like Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time really suited. Dean considered the first book in the series best, A Question of Upbringing, because some of it was set in Eton. Although Dean had not been at Eton, or anywhere much at all, he enjoyed reading about schoolboys cooking sausages in their rooms, and their pranks outwitting the masters.